Honduras coup leaders schooled in Georgia
June 29, 2009 at 5:29 pm by Andisheh Nouraee in NewsThe two alleged top leaders of the weekend’s military coup in Honduras are graduates of the U.S. Army’s Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a.k.a. the School of the Americas at Fort Benning in Columbus.
General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, head of Honduras’ armed forces, attended the school in 1976 and again in 1986. General Luis Javier Prince Suazo, head of the country’s air force, attended the school for a month in 1996.
WHINSEC/School of the Americas was founded in 1963, ostensibly to help professionalize the militaries of U.S.-allied countries in Latin America. A September 21, 1996 article by the Washington Post’s Dana Priest revealed the school taught students how to torture, kidnap, extort and execute prisoners. Priest won a Pulitzer Prize ten years later for uncovering the Bush Administration’s gulag archipelago chain of secret CIA prisons.
June 29th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Also of note is that according to
US Navy Adm. James S. Stavridis, who met in late Jan 2009 with President Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales, Defense Minister Aristides Mejia Carranza and Defense Chief Maj. Gen. Romeo Orlando Vasquez Velasquez (coup leader)
“The arrival of four U.S.-funded “fast boats,” slated for delivery that day, will further enhance Honduras’ drug-interdiction capabilities, Rodriguez explained.
The United States is providing the boats, as well training and equipment to operate and maintain them, through the Enduring Friendship security assistance program.
By 2010, the United States plans to buy four light observation aircraft for the Honduran military to augment the four the Hondurans recently bought to support counter-trafficking, he said.
Stavridis noted the long history of friendship and cooperation between the United States and Honduras that he said has paved the way for important security successes.
He thanked Honduran leaders for their support for Joint Task Force-Bravo, Southcom’s only permanently deployed U.S. forces in the region, which has operated in Honduras since 1983.”
Read the rest here.
http://www.southcom.mil/AppsSC/news.php?storyId=1540
Your tax dollars at work, and flushed down the drain.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:14 am
This is not a coup. If anything it is an action to counter the attempted coup by the former president